how is it that we can agree on anything at all? — TheMadFool

Are you talking about reality?

Are you talking about reality? — Zophie

Why do you ask? Your question presupposes a particular notion of reality that you have which I suppose you feel mine doesn't correspond all that well with. Perhaps we can work towards a mutually acceptable version of our "two" realities and that's what those people who claim that consciousness is subjective have to explain if they're to maintain their position, no?

I ask since your subjective-objective struggle can be solved in reference to a third element if you are looking for an explanation that is relevant to multiple people. Let's call it the Reality Theory.

I ask since your subjective-objective struggle can be solved in reference to a third element if you are looking for an explanation that is relevant to multiple people. Let's call it the Reality Theory. — Zophie

Go on...

Thoughts, sensations (consciousness) are areas we've reached consensus on — TheMadFool

This is really not true at all even though psychology seems cogent on a superficial level. Reality dictates the subjective consensus that aggregates over time. For easy things like physics this took a mere 2,000 years. Apparently a successful and complete understanding of mind will yet take more trial runs..

Edit: Just to point out I was originally the questioner. I wasn't planing to defend realism.

Well if that quote were applied to bats, then what you say is correct. But it's also true to say that we can't apply that quote to other animals either, nor people for that matter.

I take it that the point of Nagel's quote is that no matter how much we study the brain, given the methods we have, we'll be leaving out a crucial aspect of life. In that sense, Nagel is correct, or so it looks like to me.

What looked profound, "the subjective essence of the experience", begins to look more like mere wordplay. — Banno

Yeah, speaking about "subjectivity" and "objectivity" can be quite confusing if used too much, in that I agree. If he said something like the most important aspect of experience for us, then that might be more clear. But the gist of the quote looks correct to me.

I am slightly changing the slant of your question because I wouldn't really want to be a bat, but I think that it is also interesting to to what extent we can really know what it is like to be another person. I am sure that we all try to practice empathy but, to what extent do we REALLY know others' inner worlds, because so much is filtered through our own personal perspective? We may think we understand others, but I am sure in many cases this understanding can be limited by our own experiences.

If you think about it, this opens out into the question of the sense in which 'the world' exists independently of the experiencing subject. In other words, if you wish to depict the world as existing 'from no perspective', what is being lost, or being concealed, in that depiction? There is a subjective pole to experience, and therefore reality, which is concealed by the objectivist stance. And that is the insight that gave rise to phenomenology. — Wayfarer

As long as experience is left out, the description is not complete at all. The subject of "mind independence" is one of the hardest of them all! I'm inclined to mostly agree with Schopenhauer on this topic, or varieties of idealists. Everything is a representation and when we are gone, what remains in the world is unknown or very very hard to mention.

Phenomenology very much highlights just how rich experience can be. It's also difficult, in my experience, to find people who do phenomenology in a way that is not very abstract and filled with lots of technicalities. In this respect, Tallis is excellent.

Reality dictates the subjective consensus that aggregates over time. — Zophie

That went over my head. Sorry but can you expand on that a bit? What does it mean, this subjective consensus. That's an oxymoron for you, right?

Great topic, but I have to go for today. Stuff to bake.

You can't possibly know that. [/quote]

I do know something about science and science has studied this question. There is not complete agreement but many animals do not appear capable of identifying themselves in a mirror and the conclusion is they are not self-conscious. Humans do not pass the mirror test until age two.

Dogs have been mirror-tested, and dogs don't pass. Because they're not smart enough to recognize themselves in a mirror, the presumption is they can't think of themselves as unique individuals, so they aren't part of the self-conscious elite in the animal kingdom. — Robert Krulwich

We just assume we're all pretty much the same.

I agree with you, although most won’t. I think Aristotelian philosophy believed there are ontological distinctions between living and non-living, between animal and vegetative, and between rational and non-rational beings. An ontological distinction means there’s a difference in kind. But these distinctions were discarded along with many other elements of Aristotelianism by modern science, which tends to try and explain everything in terms of matter-energy. Nagel elaborates his point in more detail in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos where he says that:

The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Wayfarer

I believe there are different scientific points of view.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/03/03/134167145/i-sniff-therefore-i-am-are-dogs-self-conscious

.

2. However much I learn about the objective world I can never know what it is like to be a bat.

However much I learn about the objective world I can never know everything about the world.

From this it does not follow that

3. Therefore there is something in reality that is outside of the objective world.

What follows is that there is something in reality that is outside the limits of my knowledge.

I am slightly changing the slant of your question because I wouldn't really want to be a bat, but I think that it is also interesting to to what extent we can really know what it is like to be another person. I am sure that we all try to practice empathy but, to what extent do we REALLY know others' inner worlds, because so much is filtered through our own personal perspective? We may think we understand others, but I am sure in many cases this understanding can be limited by our own experiences. — Jack Cummins

:lol: There are few things I hate more than a young person replying to something I have said about myself with "I understand." No, we do not understand another person's experience especially if we never had an equal experience. I studied gerontology (study of aging) thinking that would become a career for me. I thought I knew something about being old. :lol: Textbooks and working with older people, do not give us the understanding that we gain from personal experience. And The rich and poor do not share the same understanding of reality. The rich do not know the experience of poverty nor does the person who has only known poverty know how it feels to have plenty of money every day of the year. A White person can not know what it is like to be a person of color. Or as a convict once said to me, "You can think shit taste bad but you don't how bad until you eat it."

This heads toward the 'beetle-in-the-box' idea. How can 'pain' have a public meaning? And yet it does (there are right ways and wrong ways to use the word.) Same with 'red' and 'green' tho there's no way to check raw sensations. But then how does 'raw sensation' or how does 'experience' get public meaning? — j0e

:lol: It would be great if our doctor's understood our pain and the best way to live with it.

If we take it in a strictly matter- energy paradigm... whereby ecosystems exchange energy and matter through cycles of life and death. And seeing as both you and the bat are composed of the same stuff and live in the same place - earth, then statement would be ... it’s likely that once I or part of me was a bat and that again in the future a bat may be composed of stuff from my body, I cannot remember being a bat nor will the bat remember being me. Therefore awareness of oneself must be restricted to/ Gained only in the state of living.

Yes, I think that you capture how hard it is to understand the whole nature of experience. I think that people often say they understand to try to make the other feel better. I have seen people doing that in mental health care. It is important to try to understand others' experiences through listening, but it is too easy to say we understand when probably we only do in a shallow way. Sometimes it is as if really all bats.

You claimed animals have no imagination.

You can't possibly know that.

It would be great if our doctor's understood our pain and the best way to live with it. — Athena

Indeed. We might ask why we all think that pain-killers can be effective if no one can check in the secret box of the other where pain is supposed to live.

I agree, but why/how? I speculate that it's part of the language we're trained into being able to use with others.

1. There is something it is like to be a bat.

2. However much I learn about the objective world I can never know what it is like to be a bat.

3. Therefore there is something in reality that is outside of the objective world.

Do you agree with the argument? — Aoife Jones

No. The argument assumes there are objective and subjective worlds, which a non-dualist rejects.

Here's a similar argument that doesn't assume dualism:

1. A bat experiences the world when it uses echolocation.

2. Regardless of human knowledge, human beings can never know what it is like to experience the world as a bat does.

3. Therefore there is something in reality that is beyond human knowledge.

In the future, could we be augmented with echolocation technology and so experience the world as a bat does (at least in that respect)? If so, then premise 2 would be false.

But if premise 2 entails being a bat (note the be in the original argument) in order to experience the world as a bat does, then premise 2 would be true. This is just an identity claim. But, by that criterion, I would also never know what it is like to be any other person, since I am not them.

I think, under normal considerations, that identity criterion is too strong. We do know what it is like to experience the world as other people do and even as other creatures do in particular circumstances, however imperfectly (e.g., when suffering an injury).

Huh, we do have echolocation technology.

Echolocation And Its Technological Developments - GIS Resources
www.gisresources.com › echolocation-technological

The concept of dispatching a sound into the atmosphere, then calculating the time it takes to echo back is called echolocation. Application of Echolocation In the World Echolocation isn’t only restricted to dolphins. People accommodated this rule into sonar, that sends pings inside the water & listens for the echoes. — Anna Kucirkova

I like

Jack Cummins — Jack Cummins

example of people with mental health problems. Here our bodies are the same but our experience of life is different. I think it is hugely important we know without question that our experience is not the same as another and our understanding of what the other is experiencing is very shallow.

Businesses today are losing a lot of customers because their way of doing business is a huge turn-off and at the same time we seem to be more clueless about turning customers away and why we have serious social problems than ever before! In general sensitivity of another being different and perhaps getting closed out, is at an all-time high! But I have also experienced some people being extremely nice and helpful. When I got my covid shots the folks doing that at the fairgrounds and the football stadium were sooo nice! I have to clarify this because those people involved with covid were different from what is common today, of expecting everyone to understand the technology and the procedure and the policies. One is more personal and people caring about others and this challenge to overcome a serious problem, and the other is excessively impersonal and shuts people out.

Huh, we do have echolocation technology. — Athena

Yes, so conceivably echolocation technology could be embedded into the brain and body so that a person could see (so to speak) with their eyes closed. Things would look different via that sense modality since the information received would be different.

I like
Jack Cummins
— Jack Cummins
example of people with mental health problems. Here our bodies are the same but our experience of life is different. I think it is hugely important we know without question that our experience is not the same as another and our understanding of what the other is experiencing is very shallow. — Athena

Indeed, empathy depends on recognizing points of difference as well as points of commonality.

Experience is a subjective thing. When you unpack "1. A bat experiences the world when it uses echolocation.", you're saying there's an experiencer (the bat), and it has experiences. Those experiences are therefore the bat's subjective experiences.

If you're not a dualist, and you believe experiences are real, how are they real?

If you're not a dualist, and you believe experiences are real, how are they real? — RogueAI

Depends on what you mean by “real”. Life seems real while we are living it, but before our birth, we did not miss not being alive for an estimated 13.7 billion years (from the Big Bang). And when we die, we won’t know that we are dead, so we won’t miss being alive at that time either.

Since birth, everything we know comes from personal experience based on information gathered by the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. We may imagine what something might be like, but will only “know for sure” from personal experience.

He can't know, not because of any failing in his capacity to observe, but because knowing does not fit here.

It's not that there is a something it is like to be a bat, but you cannot observe and understand it; It's not event that there is not something that it is like to be a bat; It's rather that we cannot even determine if there is a something that it is like to be a bat. — Banno

Okay.

What is added by calling it "subjectiveness"? — Banno

A taking for granted of another being's identity, ie. that is has an identity, that it is an entity with some permanent characteristics, that there is a continuity to it. One such is taken for granted, it makes sense to talk of "what it's like to be a bat".

You come to the right idea here, but for the wrong reasons. Talk about physics, chemistry or physiology is distinct from talk about desire, intent or understanding. All that paraphernalia of subjectivism is quite unneeded here. — Banno

Talk of consciousness has to do at least two things: it has to satisfy the scientific standards of analyzing consciousness in terms of chemistry, physiology, and such; and it has to address the moral and legal implications of however consciousness is conceived of conceptually (hence the paraphernalia of subjectivism).

This does not mean the bat is not conscious, it could well be. Maybe it's on the borderline between consciousness and pure instinct. I think part of Nagel's point in choosing a bat is precisely to show an edge case. — Manuel

He explains his choice:

"I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all,
they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have
experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience.
I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one
travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed
their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more
closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present
a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours
that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it
certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the
benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some
time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to
encounter a fundamentally alien form of life."

Even without the
benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some
time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to
encounter a fundamentally alien form of life." — baker

Thanks for pointing that out.

Wouldn't being in a completely dark cave and using a rock to try and find out where the walls are be akin to a kind of echolocation?

Sure, it could well be the case that bats have experience. There's no way to tell that I know of. I don't think this should necessarily raise ethical concerns about treating bats badly or anything like that. I assume our intuitions of giving experience to creatures starts to blur quite a bit in the case of worms.

Part of the problem has to do with using our notion of experience and applying to other species. But we know of no other metric to think about experience at all.

Wouldn't being in a completely dark cave and using a rock to try and find out where the walls are be akin to a kind of echolocation? — Manuel

Of course, some blind people use such rudimentary forms of echolocation.

Sure, it could well be the case that bats have experience. There's no way to tell that I know of. I don't think this should necessarily raise ethical concerns about treating bats badly or anything like that.

But it does raise such concerns.
Look at Descartes and the like:

In 1647, Rene Descartes exploded biology wide open by theorizing that the body was merely a mechanical instrument. The soul was what gave consciousness, and it resided somewhere in the pineal gland. Unfortunately for the neighborhood dogs, Descartes also theorized that only humans had souls.

If animals were soulless, they were just machines. Therefore they didn’t feel pain—they only acted as if they did. So therefore, it was okay to cut them open and experiment on them. And Descartes sure loved a good experiment.

By his own account, Descartes happily sliced open dogs and stuck his finger into their still-beating hearts, marveling at how the valves opened and closed around his knuckle. But the madness doesn’t stop there. According to some biographers, his first vivisection was an attempt to discover once and for all if animals had souls. And the animal he chose to practice on was his wife’s dog.
/.../

https://knowledgenuts.com/descartes-dissected-his-wifes-dog-to-prove-a-point/

Any account of consciousness has to account for its moral implications.